Earlier this month, he finally got to open "the box".Mr Small has relied on the late Australian scientist Harold Burnell Carter's findings throughout his on-farm career in Coleraine, in Victoria's south-west.Dr Carter's research into how the genetic makeup of sheep skin shapes wool growth and vulnerability to flystrike gave the industry tools that remain in use today.Inside Dr Carter's crates were 10,000 microscope slides, a bag of wool from 1828, and the unpublished notes of a man some consider one of the greatest wool scientists Australia ever produced."It was all a bit of a mystery until we opened the box," Mr Small said."It was beyond my expectations, and the wool scientists were just over the moon with how fantastic it was."Dr Carter was a leading wool scientist at the CSIRO in the 1940s and 1950s who left for the UK after a dispute with colleagues."He was really hunted out of Australia by competitive scientists who had other ideas about breeding sheep," Mr Small said Every box you opened, there was something new, something unexpected," Dr Swan said.The boxes contained textbooks, CSIRO documents, transcripts of meetings with French and Russian scientists, notes from early experiments with skin grafts, and the thousands of microscope slides.When Dr Carter was working in Australia, wool made up 56 per cent of the gross value of all Australian agricultural production.He joined the CSIRO at the outbreak of World War II, but post-war funding brought more scientists and more competition."The work that Harold was doing and the conclusions that were drawn stepped on some toes," he said."In an industry that was very politically important at the time